Monday, October 30, 2017

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Melissa Fraterrigo, author of the novel Glory Days, now out from the University of Nebraska Press. Melissa also wrote the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in more than forty literary journals and anthologies from Shenandoah and The Massachusetts Review to storySouth, Notre Dame Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. She is founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers Studio, in Lafayette, Indiana, where she also teaches classes on the art and craft of writing. To learn more visit melissafraterrigo.com

The First Time I Read to My Dad

I was nervous the first time my dad came to a reading. It was for my first book, the short story collection, The Longest Pregnancy. The reading was held in my hometown library, in one of the meeting rooms with glass doors that I used to walk past on my way to the children’s section with its bright tables and mini stage and bathroom with a toilet that fit my child-sized bum perfectly.

My father brought me to the library most weeks when I was a child. We would enter the building together and he’d walk me to the children’s section, then send me off while he went upstairs to check out thick tomes with images of WWII bombers involved in firefights or a Civil War battlefield, with the close-up of two soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. Guns and flack jackets. Hardtack and government-issued cigarettes. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force.

Despite never serving his country, my dad has a great reverence for this sort of factual writing, as showcased by the books he selected. I, on the other hand, loved the imaginary world of fiction. Stories took me away from our small suburban town with its bland brick bungalows and staid expectations. At home, I had two choices: I could be a nurse like my mom, or a teacher. But inside the pages of a book, I could be a girl on the frontier or own a talking poodle with a scheme for getting rich.

My dad and I both loved books yet had vastly different tastes.

Alas, reading fiction was a fine past time for an eight-year-old, but it was not something to study in college and certainly not something to focus on during graduate school. So while I gave in to my father and earned the steady teaching degree he advised, the gnawing urge to write never left me and I decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Bowing Green State University.

“Fiction is not real,” my dad told me, the day before I left for Bowling Green, Ohio, where I would begin my graduate studies. Fortunately, by then, I had all but stopped listening to him.

So here we were back at the Lansing Public Library nearly a decade after I began graduate school, celebrating the release of my first book of short stories. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. My dad sat beside my mother in the front row. My nerves were frayed. One of my preschool teachers held her hands in her lap and next to her was the neighbor whose kids I used to babysit. One of the librarians introduced me and the reading started off like any other. I began to read “Scar Serum,” a story about a portly girl who becomes enamored with her neighbor, an inventor. Mr. Carpone’s latest invention is a serum that remedies wounds in an instant and in order to test the serum, Mr. Carpone must remove some of the protagonist’s clothes and place her in exceedingly challenging positions.

Now, nothing energizes me more than reading my work and experiencing the immediacy of the audience; only this time, as I read, I felt like I stood inside a sauna rather than the library. Sweat trickled down my armpits and along the backs of my thighs. I felt it pooling in the crevices behind my knees and I began to drift off. I felt otherworldly. I arrived at the place in the story where the protagonist is at her most vulnerable. And so was I, as I read the line “. . . her underpants were white and generous.”

Words still slid from my mouth, but I could not rid myself of the thought that my dad was sitting a few feet away, legs and arms crossed, while I rambled on about a character’s undergarments.

I tried not to look at him or my mom. I reminded myself to stay calm. I was almost finished. I could do this. But these entreaties were not enough. Soon my vision narrowed and grew dotty and someone brought me a chair—or did I simply walk into the audience and sit down? I do remember taking a seat and helping myself to a tissue from the little plastic packet my mother extended to me. I dabbed my face. Breathed. After a few moments, I again stood and finished reading the story and then as my preschool teacher and neighbor and other members of the audience applauded, I glanced at my dad. His grin was wide and unmistakable, the warmth of it so bright that I immediately matched it with my own. And as I stood there dopey faced with glee, I looked away. Later he hugged me and told me he was proud of me. He didn’t need to say it. I knew how he felt, but I thanked him regardless.

I no longer think I have as much to prove to my dad. He knows that I’ve spent much of my professional life writing and teaching others about the craft, and while I know what I create will never be as vivid to him as a battlefield, I’d like to think he respects my work. Regardless, readings can still be a little nerve-wracking for me and with the release of my new novel I don’t want to take any chances. The truth is I need to find a way a nice way to encourage my dad to stay home.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Congratulations to John Smith, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: the new novel by Eric Rickstad, The Names of Dead Girls.

This week’s contest is for Freebird, a novel by Jon Raymond which came out earlier this year from Graywolf Press. I have a new hardcover copy of the book to give away to one lucky reader. Here’s what Benjamin Percy (author of The Dark Net) had to say about the novel: “No one writes sentences so graceful and characters so achingly real as Jon Raymond. Sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, oftentimes at the same moment, Freebird is the gripping story of a dysfunctional family through which we better understand these dysfunctional times.” Keep scrolling for more information about Freebird...

The Singers, an all-American family in the California style, are about to lose everything. Anne is a bureaucrat in the Los Angeles Office of Sustainability whose ideals are compromised by a proposal from a venture capitalist seeking to privatize the city’s wastewater. Her brother, Ben, a former Navy SEAL, returns from Afghanistan disillusioned and struggling with PTSD, and starts down a path toward a radical act of violence. And Anne’s teenage son, Aaron, can’t decide if he should go to college or pitch it all and hit the road. They all live inside the long shadow of the Singer patriarch Grandpa Sam, whose untold experience of the Holocaust shapes his family’s moral character to the core. Jon Raymond, screenwriter of the acclaimed films Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, combines these narrative threads into a hard-driving story of one family’s moral crisis. In Freebird, Raymond delivers a brilliant, searching novel about death and politics in America today, revealing how the fates of our families are irrevocably tied to the currents of history.

If you’d like a chance at winning Freebird, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Nov. 2, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Nov. 3. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Many creatives don't confine themselves to one field. If you've got inventive urges in one discipline you might well have them in others. And you might easily be led astray.

My first major distraction project came in the 1990s. I was working as a sub-editor on a magazine and was supposed to be guarding my weekends to write The Novel. This was The Novel I could then use to dazzle an agent. I hoped it would start the writing career I’d begun to seriously aim for. But the manuscript was a monstrous mess. On a Saturday morning, I’d sit at the computer, open the files and they would make no sense. Characters, plot and my intentions were like a language whose vocabulary and grammar I’d forgotten.

I was an ideal candidate for distraction.

In my teen years I had been a music dabbler. I’d spend long hours at a piano, writing songs. Later I was in a student band. Afterward, writing fiction became the chief creative obsession, but occasionally I strayed back to music. When I discovered a friend (day job in high finance) was also a recovering teen musician, I couldn’t resist a Saturday making glorious noise. Just one.

Stephane came round with his keyboard. I blew the dust off my upright piano. We hit a hitch immediately. Stephane was classically trained and my hamfisted key-bashing couldn't keep up with his jazzy polish, though he was too polite to say so. What could we play that would be bearable?
There, on the sideboard, was inspiration. My husband, an author, was putting together a proposal with an illustrator for a series of books for children. We spread out the artwork on the dining table—enchanting pictures of a green garden with roguish and lovable creatures.

Stephane and I composed a piece of music for one of the pictures. I figured out a melody. He added the professional zing. It was such a buzz that we wrote another.

The composition became a major task. Weekend after weekend, my tough-as-gristle novel sat untouched on my hard drive. Meanwhile Stephane and I wrote signature tunes for all the characters. Something slinky for the fox. A languid musical yawn for a sleepy cat that lived on the garden wall. Upstairs, husband and artist worked on the proposal, and when they needed a break they amused themselves with a cup of tea and a slice of home-made music.

Finally, the itch scratched, I went back to my novel. I’d like to say the musical detour had given my grey cells a refreshing break, but the novel was more opaque than ever.

My second distraction project was much more recent. I had now mastered two novels into published form and was on my third. I came back from holiday, sleeves rolled up for serious revision. I knew my manuscript needed a lot of time and understanding. But when I opened the file, it seemed to be mumbling from a far-off land where nothing made sense. I took the coward’s way out. I spent five days designing, typesetting and printing a personal recipe book, just for me.

It was such fun to use my professional know-how for sheer amusement. Curating the content from scrappy scribblings. Finding a use for the photos of dinner parties. Writing jaunty back-cover copy (If you see this book in use, keep calm and drink more).

Happy explorations; joy in the act of creativity; gratitude for whatever inspiration came on the day. It was so carefree. Writing my novels wasn’t like this, but I realised it had been in the earliest days. Once writing became my vocation, my commitment and even my bid to leave a little significance behind me, there were expectations. It could never again be taken lightly. There was the possibility, always, of failure.
The distraction project, on the other hand, was an airy lark. Forgiving of inadequacy. It could never disappoint me.

But when I returned to my novel, some of that new ease remained, like a glow from a good holiday. In making a quick, cheeky book for myself, I’d reminded myself I was naturally creative. I was a person who could make something out of nothing. In using grown-up tools for play, I’d remembered the simple satisfaction of making books. I learned not to take myself so seriously. I also felt more masterful when back in my proper element.

Alas, other work got in the way. Consultancy and teaching derailed my plans again. I struggled to keep connected to the novel. A year on, I returned from another holiday, having cleared some time and....

I blame my husband. He spotted that I had a travel diary. Make it into a book, he said.

Don’t be silly, I said. I write novels. And anyway, those are just doodles.

But I can resist anything except temptation.

Editing the travel diary was more work than I imagined. It took much longer than a week or two. But it became my most rewarding detour yet.

I was used to writing big stories. My fictional characters endure immense turmoil. My real life isn’t like that, for which I must be thankful, but that meant the events in my travel diary were of a light and low-key hue. What’s more, they couldn’t be tweaked to create more drama. All the interest would come from presentation, interpretation, performance. How another person’s eccentricities help you discover your own edges. How a house being demolished is a reckoning with a childhood. The language of the personal essay.

Fast forward a few months, and I am back to the novel with more tools in my belt.

This travel diary was the tune-up I needed. It strengthened my repertoire, like cross-training. I’ve found narrative shapes in surprising places. I’ve let the mystery of a moment or a place speak for itself. I’ve noticed more how small events can shift your comprehension, or a reader’s. And, most thrillingly, I’ve seen that a novel is, in some ways, a personal essay for the characters.

And, for the first time, one of my distraction projects has grown up into an actual, presentable thing—Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction. It has reminded me that this process is frustrating and demanding, but so satisfying too. And that it always starts with play.

This week’s contest is for the new novel by Eric Rickstad, The Names of Dead Girls. I have a signed copy ready to put in one lucky reader’s hands. Here’s what others have been saying about the book: “Eric Rickstad is the rare writer who can wrap a dark, gritty story in smooth, poetic prose. If you haven’t discovered his work yet, The Names of Dead Girls is the place to start. It’s a taut, masterful thriller and a terrific read.” (Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of The Ex) Keep scrolling for more information about the novel...

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Eric Rickstad delivers another Canaan Crime novel and features once again detectives Frank Rath and Sonja Test as they track a depraved killer through rural Vermont. Every murder tells a story. Some stories never end....In a remote northern Vermont town, college student Rachel Rath is being watched. She can feel the stranger’s eyes on her, relentless and possessive. And she’s sure the man watching her is the same man who killed her mother and father years ago: Ned Preacher, a serial rapist and murderer who gamed the system to get a light sentence. Now, he’s free. Detective Frank Rath adopted Rachel, his niece, after the shocking murder of her parents when she was a baby. Ever since, Rath’s tried to protect her from the true story of her parents’ deaths. But now Preacher is calling Rath to torment him. He’s threatening Rachel and plotting cruelties for her, of the flesh and of the mind. When other girls are found brutally murdered, and a woman goes missing, Rath and Detective Sonja Test must untangle the threads that tie these new crimes and some long-ago nightmares together. Soon they will learn that the truth is more perverse than anyone could guess, rife with secrets, cruel desires, and warped, deadly loyalty. Mesmerizing, startling, and intricately plotted, The Names of Dead Girls builds relentlessly on its spellbinding premise, luring readers into its dark and macabre mystery, right to its shocking end.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Names of Dead Girls, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 26, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 27. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Monday, October 16, 2017

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Eric Rickstad, the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of The Canaan Crime Series: Lie in Wait, The Silent Girls, and, his newest novel, The Names of Dead Girls. Dark, disturbing and compulsively readable psychological thrillers set in northern Vermont, the series is heralded as intelligent, profound, heartbreaking and mind shattering. His first novel Reap was a New York Times noteworthy novel. His fifth novel, What Remains of Her, is poised to be the most addictive and creepy read of the summer of 2018. Rickstad lives in his home state of Vermont.

The First Time I Knew I Had to Write

I can’t remember a time I did not read. Long before it was ever expected that kids “graduate” from kindergarten with the ability to read, I was reading at the age of four. In the fifth grade, I attended “literary luncheon” with the school librarian. Twice a week, instead of having lunch in the cafeteria, ten 5th graders met with the librarian in the principle’s conference room to discuss the merits of Encyclopedia Brown, The Secret Garden, Charlotte’s Web, Danny Champion of the World, and Freckle Juice.

I always wrote, too. When I read, I wanted to know how the writer did that, how she used words to manipulate my emotions so I felt sad or happy or scared, or conjured images as real as any object in the physical world. So, I wrote. Yet even with the influence of all the wonderful authors, my “writing” was not with purpose or intent or passion. I was in grade school after all, so my writing did not come from inside me. I mimicked the writing of authors I liked, and was typical gruesome kid stories, rip offs of stories such as Roald Dahl’s “Pig.” My version of “Pig” was missing the social satire —way over my head at the time—and concentrated on the gore and horror, putting a man through a bubble gum maker instead of an abattoir, stretching and torturing him until he came out the other side as a wad of bubble gum, got chewed by a cat, spat out on a sidewalk, stuck to a shoe, and so on.

Then, one summer day when I was still in junior high, my older sister’s boyfriend popped a cassette tape in the player as he drove his rusted, primer gray convertible VW Bug down the highway, and said: “Listen to this.”

The opening piano notes of a song played, and a voice sang, the words combining to create a story, a magic, of the likes I’d never heard.

The screen door slams/ Mary’s dress waves / Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.

I saw Mary in her dress. I saw her standing on the porch. By the song’s finale, I saw her graduation gown lying in rags at their feet. I felt the lonely cool before dawn and heard their engines rolling on. I felt her aloneness, and the narrator’s aloneness and desperation and sincerity for something different, something more.

As the album continued, I felt the earnestness and fleetingness of youth and love, and their often broken promises. I felt the pain in the words. The lust and sadness. The struggle. The triumph. The loss. I felt the shots echo down them hallways in the night. I felt the hot sun and the mysterious nights and the complete freedom yet imprisonment of driving with no place to go. I had not yet lived any of these things, and I say I felt them because I did not really understand them. Yet, my gut and my heart felt it all, were awakened by the lyrics in a way no novel or short story had awakened them. That album reached me because of a deep loss in my life. My father had left my mom and three sisters and me a few years earlier, and that void, the pain and loneliness of it, was understood and respected in the words I heard blasting out the car speakers.

I saved up and bought the album and I played it over and over and over again trying to decipher its mysteries. I fell asleep listening to it, and awoke to the stylus of my cheap record player scratching in its endless final groove, cssuuusssh cssusssh csusssh, and before I rose from bed, I’d pick up the needle’s arm and set the needle back at the beginning to start my day.

Lyrics such as Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge / Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain and The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all / They just stand back and let it all be cut to the quick. I knew nothing of this guy Springsteen. But I knew he meant it. He got it. He understood; and as I began to read about him, I saw comparisons in our lives of growing up working class poor, and our estrangement from our father’s, our loneliness and sense of being observers, outsiders, and a shared urgency to put all of it down on paper, into stories that tried to make sense of it and of our place in the world. He took the common and spun myths out of it. His lyrics made me want to write. For the first time. Really write. Even though I was incapable of doing it justice at that age, I knew I had to write what was within me. Let it explode on the page, however awful the adolescent writing was, however convoluted or self-pitying, or navel gazing, or juvenile. I had to write, because those lyrics also made me feel I had something to say, that we all do.

So, I wrote. And I’ve never stopped. I wrote, and learned how to “show” and not “tell” by listening to Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska thousands of times. I wrote, influenced by lyrics that possessed a singular voice, deep internalized emotion, a keen sense of place and story, and a lingering sense of mystery as to how the precise combination of words can resonate so powerfully. There is a magic to it.

I’ve tried to bring those essential elements to everything I’ve ever written, and it’s that combination I seek and admire most in novels and short stories I read, no matter how dissimilar they may be in many other ways. To give readers a sense that they’re reading a story or novel no one else could have written but me, a novel or story that impacts them, makes them think or feel, is a joy. If any of my stories or novels holds up to retain a sense of mystery, I’ve done my job well. After so many years of listening to Born to Run, even though each lyric and note was memorized long ago, their mystery remains. The magic remains.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Right away he saw Billy was a hardscrabble country boy, maybe forty years old, lean and furtive, like a fox and a squirrel had a kid, and spent half the time baking it in the sun, and the other half beating it with a stick.

Friday, October 13, 2017

Congratulations to Kristen Lodge, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash.

This week’s contest could be called a Freaky Friday the 13th Freebie. I’ve Monster Mashed a couple of books together just in time for Halloween. One lucky reader will win the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Everything You Need to Know About Nightmares and How to Defeat Them by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller. So, there’s one for you and one for the kids (or, depending on your age, one for you and one for the grownups). Keep reading...if you dare...

First up is the deluxe edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the 1818 classic has an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes. Mary Shelley’s timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror.

Everything You Need to Know About Nightmares and How to Defeat Them is, as the title claims, a handbook for beating nightmares from the New York Times bestselling authors of the Nightmares series, Jason Segel (also star of that TV show How I Met Your Mummy) and Kirsten Miller. Nightmares. They come in all shapes and sizes, from gargantuan lizards to teensy creepy-crawlies. No matter their form, we know all too well, they are truly terrifying. The good news is that every Nightmare, no matter how ferocious, mysterious, or hairy, can be defeated. And this book will tell you how. Everything You Need to Know About Nightmares and How to Defeat Them is your one-stop guide to battling anything that goes bump in the night. Whether you’re being chased by zombies or stalked by evil twins, this handy book will give you all the tools and tips you need to put your bad dreams to bed for good Keep a copy under your pillow and you’ll never fear Nightmares again.

If you’d like a chance at winning both books, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 19, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 20. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Monday, October 9, 2017

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Paulette Livers, author of the novel Cementville, a novel which opens in a small Kentucky town as coffins are making their way home from Vietnam, along with one remaining survivor, the now-maimed town quarterback recently rescued from a prison camp. Cementville was the winner of the Elle Lettres Readers Prize and finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize, Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and the Kentucky Literary Award. Paulette teaches at Story Studio and is Creative Director at Mighty Sword, a boutique writing and design studio serving writers and publishers around the country. Livers is a recipient of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Artist Grant, and is a MacDowell Fellow. Please visit www.PauletteLivers.com to learn more about her works.

My First Brush With Mortality

With so many years spent making art and texts, countless firsts have come and gone: first workshop as my graduate program’s most nontraditional student, first contracts, first awarding of those coveted bona fides. There’s the first completed novel—that obligatory one-in-the-drawer; a second novel which would be the first published, to reasonable acclaim, and sad sales figures; and the first draft of a third novel, now in revisions after my agent’s close read.

Until last fall there was one first I had not experienced: An up-close encounter with mortality.

Oh sure, I’d gotten myself into dangerous scrapes: the near fatal car accident at 18. The heart-thumping race against a lightning storm while backpacking up a 14,000-foot peak in the Rockies. Class V rapids in the Grand Canyon. An idiotic rock-climbing venture with an “expert” whom every cell in my body told me not to trust. I consider myself a reasonable risk-taker with a faith in pushing physical and mental strength where it hasn’t gone before. After all, I’d always enjoyed perfect health. A doctor who examined me early last year said, “You’re trim, you’re active, and you have low blood pressure. You’ll live to be 100!” My body was the sturdy house for my mind, the dependable turtle shell from which I’d written and created for years.

But the body is a fickle partner to the mind. Mine started to turn on me last September, when I learned the bronchitis I hadn’t been able to shake was actually pneumonia—and something else. Hospitalization, an isolation room (they suspected tuberculosis), and multiple tests later, we uncovered a mycobacterial colonization of my lungs, which had found its perfect habitat due to an incurable lung disease I didn’t even know I had. Bronchiectasis had killed my sister at age 32; not until I was diagnosed with it did I learn that the condition carries a familial connection. Another sister has been living with it and managing it for a couple of years now.

But this was just the start.

A routine mammogram in October turned up something suspicious. Fast forward: biopsy, surgery, chemo, and at the end of June, the last radiation treatment. In the midst of all this, quarterly CT scans of my lungs showed a pesky nodule, and the word “biopsy” again hung over me. I was supposed to be celebrating freedom from breast cancer, and suddenly couldn’t be sure I was home free.

You might be asking, What has this to do with firsts in writing? Almost everything I’ve ever written has dealt with death, either overtly or as a subtext. Coming from a very large extended family, I’ve encountered so many losses at this point, I probably (foolishly) believed I was inured to what the personal confrontation with mortality might do to notions about my own impermanence.

Wedged in among medical appointments and new tests, surgeries and consultations, and injections of toxins no sane person would happily choose, daily writing practice morphed into a wholly unfamiliar mental beast. That third novel hung in a Twilight Zone world, its ending coming one sentence, one phrase, or even a single image at a time, little nuggets that two or three times a week glimmered weakly through the ever-present fatigue.

I credit my hard-driving mother for the relentless worker I am. Moving into the reasonable expectations I would undoubtedly advise a sick friend to embrace has been a lesson in acceptance I didn’t even know I needed. No one’s to blame; there isn’t some supreme being who took time off from keeping the planets in orbit in order to stick it to Paulette.

Illnesses happen to people every second of every day. I have health care in a country where that’s far from guaranteed. I have family and friends who love me. I have places like The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts that will shelter and feed me so I can work without interruption. I have mobility, and a mind, and a body that, for all its insults and infidelities, is still not a total shambles of a house. Regardless of when my new novel eventually runs through a printing press, the planets are not likely to go whizzing off into the ether.

Today an image. Tomorrow a phrase. By the end of the week, a sentence. At some point, Finis.

Friday, October 6, 2017

This week’s contest is for the new novel by Wiley Cash, The Last Ballad. Keep scrolling for more information about the book...

The New York Times bestselling author of the celebrated A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy returns with this eagerly awaited new novel set in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina in 1929 and inspired by actual events. The chronicle of an ordinary woman’s struggle for dignity and her rights in a textile mill, The Last Ballad is a moving tale of courage in the face of oppression and injustice, with the emotional power of Ron Rash’s Serena, Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day, and the unforgettable films Norma Rae and Silkwood. Twelve times a week, twenty-eight-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, North Carolina. The insular community considers the mill’s owners—the newly arrived Goldberg brothers—white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May’s best friend. While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for seventy-two hours of work each week, it’s the only opportunity she has. Her no-good husband, John, has run off again, and she must keep her four young children alive with whatever work she can find. When the union leaflets begin circulating, Ella May has a taste of hope, a yearning for the better life the organizers promise. But the mill owners, backed by other nefarious forces, claim the union is nothing but a front for the Bolshevik menace sweeping across Europe. To maintain their control, the owners will use every means in their power, including bloodshed, to prevent workers from banding together. On the night of the county’s biggest rally, Ella May, weighing the costs of her choice, makes up her mind to join the movement—a decision that will have lasting consequences for her children, her friends, her town—indeed all that she loves. Seventy-five years later, Ella May’s daughter Lilly, now an elderly woman, tells her nephew about his grandmother and the events that transformed their family. Illuminating the most painful corners of their history, she reveals, for the first time, the tragedy that befell Ella May after that fateful union meeting in 1929. Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America—and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Last Ballad, simply email your name and mailing address to

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on Oct. 12, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on Oct. 13. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

OK, I don’t really have a library. Not in the sense that I think of a library, that vast room with shelves from floor to ceiling, a place worthy of Colonel Mustard and his pipe wrench. But I do have a lot of bookshelves and cabinets.

This is what’s left of what was my Best American Short Stories and O’Henry Awards collection from 1974-2005. I lost so many editions to severe water damage, it kills me. I first read BASS in the early ’90s when in college. These stories opened up my mind to what was possible with words, precise language, and love of craft. Each was a gem that excited me to read more ravenously than ever, and a challenge to write my best. Joyce Carol Oates. Alice Munro. John Edgar Wideman. Harlan Ellison. Alice Adams. Rick Bass. Denis Johnson. And on and on and on. Who were these word conjurers of tales so strange and wondrous and singular? I devoured the stories, and I bought each subsequent edition in the years to come, along with the O’Henry collections. After reading the first copy I ever bought in 1992, I searched for past editions and bought them whenever I was in a used bookshop. Searching for and finding them was a feverish, earnest pursuit. Of course, they led me to the literary magazine world, and I gobbled up every copy of Cimarron Review, Tri-Quarterly, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and dozens of others in the periodicals section of the University of Vermont’s Bailey Howe Library. There was no going back. The door was flung wide open.

When several boxes of my editions got ruined by water damage during a move, I felt gut punched. I could recall each story in my mind and where I was when I read it the first of many, many times, what it made me feel and think, and how it made me want to write. I remember I started Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta” on the front porch of my college apartment and had to finish it inside when a downpour struck out of the blue. I read Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” while waiting for my clothes to wash at the Laundromat. And I re-read it and re-read it and re-read it. What. Was. This? Magic.

When I lost all those editions in the mid 2000s, I could have easily searched for and bought online all the used editions I wanted, with a few clicks. I could have owned them all again, and more. I still could. But, no. It wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be them: found in the back labyrinth of stacks in ancient used bookstores, dog-eared and tattered and stained, sentences and words and entire pages underlined during those moments of revelation upon my first read of them. So, I salvaged those books I could from the water damage. Luckily, among the books that were salvageable included the first one I bought in 1992. They occupy the top shelf where they belong, and once in a while I’ll take them down and be transported, not just back into the world of the stories, but to the time I first read that story. I don’t keep them in any order—as you can see, one is upside down. I read them, and I still take notes in them. They are there to be read.

I try to arrange books by author’s last name, alphabetically. It’s hopeless. As I buy more books, it would mean having to get rid of older books to accommodate new books, and I buy new books by the dozens. I gave up on shelves for a spell, and the new books just pile up. This shelf demonstrates an attempt at order, and the eclectic array on any given shelf. New books. Used books. Hardcovers and paperbacks. Fiction and nonfiction. Genre novels by John Sandford, Don Winslow and Nic Pizzolatto live among Carson Stroud, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Mia Siegert. Strewn among them are the nonfiction work On Fire by the late Larry Brown, Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin, Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donald Maass, and Under the Stars by Dan White, a history of camping in the U.S. Near one of Stephen King’s newer annual tomes and Donna Tartt’s latest addition in a decade, sit The Stories of Breece Pancake, a Wild Game Cookbook from the ’80s, and a favorite book of essays and photographs, with a foreword by the late Howard Frank Mosher, Deer Camp: Last Light in the Northeast Kingdom. Each shelf is its own mini collection of writers.

Sometimes, even in alphabetical order, a shelf will represent just a few authors in a specific genre, like this one, which is Hakan Nesser-centric, and mostly mystery/crime genre.

Other times, certain kings of the book world get their own shelf, or shelves.

There are shelves with just cookbooks, and just children’s books, rock n’ roll biographies, essays, philosophy, Judaism, hunting and fishing, and art. I keep building or buying shelves and giving away books I love to others, so they can enjoy them. I stack them at the bedside table, and the floor, and on the stairs, and I box them up and put boxes in the closet. I think I may well need a library.

Eric Rickstad is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of The Canaan Crime Series: Lie in Wait, The Silent Girls, and his newest novel, The Names of Dead Girls. Dark, disturbing and compulsively readable psychological thrillers set in northern Vermont, the series is heralded as intelligent, profound, heartbreaking and mind shattering. His first novel Reap was a New York Times noteworthy novel. His fifth novel, What Remains of Her, is poised to be the most addictive and creepy read of the summer of 2018. Rickstad lives in his home state of Vermont.

My Library is an intimate look at personal book collections. Readers are encouraged to send high-resolution photos of their home libraries or bookshelves, along with a description of particular shelving challenges, quirks in sorting (alphabetically? by color?), number of books in the collection, and particular titles which are in the To-Be-Read pile. Email thequiveringpen@gmail.com for more information.

The Quivering Pen

The Quivering Pen's motto can be summed up in two words: Book Evangelism. The blog is written and curated by David Abrams, author of the novels Brave Deeds (Grove/ Atlantic, 2017) and Fobbit (Grove/ Atlantic, 2012), from his home office in Butte, Montana. It is fueled by early-morning cups of coffee, the occasional bowl of Cheez-Its, and a lifelong love of good books.